Ending Your Texts With a Full Stop Is Rude: Study

The study, Texting insincerely: The role of the period in text messaging, was conducted by researchers at Binghamton University’s Department of Psychology.According to a new study from Binghamton University’s Harpur College, what punctuation you use- or don’t use- could misconstrue the meaning of your message. Researchers led by Binghamton University’s Celia Klin report that text messages ending with a full stop – or period – are perceived as being less sincere, probably because the people sending them are heartless. “Text messaging is one of the most frequently used computer-mediated communication (CMC) methods.

Researchers studied the texting behavior of 126 undergraduates within exchanges framed as either text messages and handwritten notes, according to the Washington Post. The rapid pace of texting mimics face-to-face communication, leading to the question of whether the critical non-verbal aspects of conversation, such as tone, are expressed in CMC,” the researchers write in the study, which was published recently in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on,” said Klin. “People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting. In the 16 experimental exchanges, the sender’s message contained a statement followed by an invitation phrased as a questions such as, ‘Dave gave me his extra ticket. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them – emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”

Wanna come?’ No more hyphens: Nearly 16,000 thousand words have been stripped of their hyphens in recent dictionary versions: leap-frog has become leapfrog, make-over has become makeover, and post-modern has become postmodern, all because people are too lazy to reach for that one extra key. As in the example above (which I harassed a friend into making with me, lest you worry that I’m having drinks with a robot that doesn’t understand how to love) the experimental messages featured an invitation followed by a brief reply. No more thought out ideas or emotion: Thoughts and ideas are now being constricted to 160 or 140 character tweets, so the color an excitement of explaining things is trickling down to just a few boring words. Text messages can be created without using letters, and it’s no wonder American students’ reading and writing scores haven’t improved over the years.

In follow-up research that hasn’t yet been published, they saw signs that exclamation points — once a rather uncouth punctuation mark — may make your messages seem more sincere than no punctuation at all. “Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations.